Courses

Advanced OpenGL for DirectX Programmers

Thursday, 29 November 16:15-18:00 | Topaz 221

OpenGL 4.2 and DirectX 11.1 are roughly at parity in terms of feature level support. However, game developers and many researchers are far more familiar with what's available in DirectX, and still think of OpenGL in terms of version 1 or 2, or OpenGL ES. However, they have the background, often including DirectX 11, to quickly learn what OpenGL has to offer in terms of a new API perspective. This course is designed to exploit this knowledge to quickly move into topics such as new hardware features exposed by OpenGL, and how OpenGL can be used in a high-performance renderer. We will show how difficiencies in older versions of OpenGL have been addressed, such as lack of shader binary support and efficient buffer management, and address topics high performance topics such as multithreading. We will look in some detail at the differences in OpenGL and DirectX that expose opportunities not available in DirectX.

Level
Advanced

Intended Audience
Real-time graphics programmers who are already expert in their field, but have limited or outdated exposure to OpenGL and want to be quickly brought up to speed.

Prerequisites
Attendees should already be very comfortable with modern graphics hardware and DirectX, including shading languages and familiarity with modern real-time renderers. Understanding of multithreading concepts will also be assumed for parts of the course.

Presenter(s)
Karl Hillesland, AMD

Karl Hillesland has been using OpenGL since 1998 and DirectX since 2002 in both academia and industry. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2005 and has since worked in game and game middleware development at Electronic Arts (Maxis) and Pixelux Entertainment. He is now part of AMD's Advanced Technologies Initiatives group where he is responsible for graphics research and development of the rendering engine used in AMD GPU demos.